In the acclaimed book ‘The Physics of God’, Joseph Selbie makes an interesting point about our thoughts. Paramahansa Yogananda, author of ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ maintained that our thoughts are not actually our own - they are part of universal thought streams that flow through the collective consciousness. This is a very profound idea indeed, because it means that we are all swimming along in the collective mind, completely caught up in its sway, believing our thoughts are uniquely ours when they’re not. They’re humankind’s thoughts. There must be an infinite number of branches as our musings meander down all sorts of tributaries. But they are universal waters, which means we are thinking the same way as others in our thought stream.
As an example, power-mongers will think in roughly the same way as all the other power-hungry humans on the planet. How to gain friends and influence people will be top of their agenda. These thought streams inevitably sweep them along to notions about how superior they are, how they can use others, who is a threat and how they can outmanoeuvre their foes. This river of thought can get very tumultuous as it flows downstream, because power is fickle – it is inevitably lost as it continually changes hands along the way. When powerful people begin to lose their grip, their thoughts become extremely anxious as the current sweeps them along at frightening speed into paranoia about who’s gaining ground, who’s hunting them down, who’s threatening their identity as the king of this and that. This is where the stream can become a torrential rapid, pushing people under and drowning them in its ferocity.
There are many such thought streams with a strong current, because we have collectively invested so much energy in them. These streams can be hard to get out of - they whisk us along in a seemingly uncontrollable manner because everyone is thinking the same thing. These waters are dangerous because we so easily identify with them, getting swept up in the strength of the ideas that underpin them.
Thoughts about body image for instance, are relentless watercourses that we can get very stuck in, tossing us about in the froth and foam as the collective obsesses about comparative looks and weight. It’s only when we become aware that we’re in a universal thought stream that we can find the banks of the river and climb out. This happens when we observe our thoughts. We climb out the moment we say, “hang on, I’m thinking about the size of my thighs again. This is not who I am. I am the light that lives in my heart, the one who is aware of these thought streams. I am the consciousness that loves and accepts myself fully, knowing I am perfectly imperfect.” This awareness then frees us from humanity’s obsession with appearances.
Every time we liberate ourselves from these thoughts by realising that it isn’t who we are, we weaken the collective current, so a raging rapid can become a calmer side-stream, and eventually a little rivulet that dries up all together. We simply need to remember not to take our thoughts so seriously. It’s nothing personal, they’re not truly us. They are the obsessions of the collective ego. And every time we become aware of the ego, we weaken it a little more.